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The tectonics would not change. The most a bomb is going to do is leave shallow craters. Nuclear blasts can't shake whole tectonic plates. However the dust that's throw up by the nuclear war will create a worldwide cloud layer that will block the sunlight and plunge the earth into a colder climate - possibly even n ice age. The cloud reflects the light and so cools the earth.

The fallout from the radiation would create mutations and kill huge portions of the population. Those weakened by the fallout will fall prey to the cold weather. The earth will be blasted and barren. It's possible that a new ice age would change the landscape through glaciation. You could set your world after the ice age lifted, or during the ice age itself.

If you really wanted a different landscape you could place this on a planet that was colonized by the escapees of this Nuclear war. Perhaps your other creatures were already there thus making mankind an intruder. Just depends how realistic you want to keep things.

There for a while it seemed to me that every time they conducted an underground Nuclear test in Nevada, California would have an earthquake. It may have been coincidence and I'm no expert but I figure if you create shock waves down there you could certainly help along some earthquakes. There is little end to the stupidity of man. We shake our heads at the cultures who did not know better than to toss their refuse off the side of a cliff and thereby made themselves sick but don't we do the same thing with all the crap we drag out into the Ocean and dump? We just have a longer arm that's all. I'll stop there before I get on a roll but basically, I don't have a hard time envisioning man shooting himself in the foot.

If man can find a way to create bombs to level a continent they would and that would cause some plate shifting. So you could just imagine a "better" nuclear bomb and viola you have what you need for your world.

“When it’s over and you look in the mirror, did you do the best that you were capable of? If so, the score does not matter. But if you find that you did your best you were capable of, you will find it to your liking.” -John Wooden

If you really wanted a different landscape you could place this on a planet that was colonized by the escapees of this Nuclear war. Perhaps your other creatures were already there thus making mankind an intruder. Just depends how realistic you want to keep things.

There for a while it seemed to me that every time they conducted an underground Nuclear test in Nevada, California would have an earthquake. It may have been coincidence and I'm no expert but I figure if you create shock waves down there you could certainly help along some earthquakes. There is little end to the stupidity of man. We shake our heads at the cultures who did not know better than to toss their refuse off the side of a cliff and thereby made themselves sick but don't we do the same thing with all the crap we drag out into the Ocean and dump? We just have a longer arm that's all. I'll stop there before I get on a roll but basically, I don't have a hard time envisioning man shooting himself in the foot.

If man can find a way to create bombs to level a continent they would and that would cause some plate shifting. So you could just imagine a "better" nuclear bomb and viola you have what you need for your world.

That's what I meant, a HUGE nuclear blast, of course it's fiction where everything is possible, so the deal is to make a land where once an upon time was our actual world map, then BOOOOM, then ice age and a reduced number of people survived this armageddon, then melting down and restabilishing of civilization. In this scenario, mythical creatures surge to flail population. Something like Shadowrun. I thougth about flooding maps, but they do not make sbustancial changes to the world map, I forgot to say that my objective in this alteration in the world map is to reduce de land portion, once it's almost impossible to cover every corner of the world in a RPG map.

You could have the climate do the opposite to what we expect and melt the ice caps to flood the world. Our understanding of the climate under extreme stress is pretty poor, so there's nothing to say that we wouldn't kick into a massive heatwave instead of nuclear winter.

As for the larger bomb, essentially anything exploding on the surface is going to do little damage to the earth's surface as the force is instead carried out and up into the air. What you would need to do is explode the device inside the earth's surface where the force of the blast is all transmitted into the crust. So a very large bomb set off inside a major fault line. If it was big enough then the power of fiction could let you have it set off a major earthquake. If you set off lots of them all along a fault line then you'd start to move towards a proper Bond villain white cat stroking moment of horror.

I think a lot of nukes are designed to burst in the air to spread their destruction over the widest possible range (at least I think that's why). There's no reason you can't have a "bunker-buster" nuke, however - designed to penetrate into the ground before exploding. That would, in theory, take out hardened underground structures and transmit much more of the energy into the crust. Make one big enough and it might make its own fault lines. Of course, the damage on the surface (apart from seismic) would be confined to a smaller area. No reason you can't combine both...drop a bunker buster on that cluster of ICBM silos north of the city and a couple of "normal" nukes on the city itself to take out manufacturing, transportation, POL supplies, etc. Oh, yeah, don't forget some neutron bombs to kill people but leave cool facilities untouched...give your guys more to explore that way.

I reckon a geologist could figure out a good way to use a handful of bunker-busters and the Ring of Fire faults to send a good portion of the west coast into the sea, create volcanos, and cause all sorts of mayhem you couldn't get with nuclear strikes alone. I imagine that dropping bombs into the headwaters of major rivers would be a nice thing too...stop them, divert them, or at least poison them for a few thousand years.